Image: Vietnam Net
IN KATHMANDU a great deal of official energy is expended on signing, stamping, scanning and stapling. These rituals rarely deliver results, but they do keep people busy: photocopy shops hum, courier services thrive and ministries remain blissfully insulated from automation. Reformers have long argued that Nepal’s binding constraint is neither capital nor labour, but carbon-based administration. Lately, the paper seems to be fighting back.
Vietnam, by contrast, has decided to retire the pen. From October 1st its government will begin rejecting paper filings for 25 essential public services. Provincial offices are due to go fully digital by December. Commune-level services moved online this month. Birth certificates, tax numbers, business permits and residency forms now live on a portal rather than at the end of a queue.
This is an attempt to rewire how the state works and, by extension, how the economy grows. “Digital by Default” sits inside a bigger push aimed at hitting 8.5% GDP growth, cutting business costs by 3% and turning Vietnam into one of ASEAN’s most appealing investment destinations within two years. Targets have been set, and bureaucracy is being redesigned to meet them.
The Ministry of Public Security, once better known for surveillance than service delivery, is now building a national data backbone. The VNeID digital-identity system lets citizens complete transactions without lugging folders of documents from counter to counter. A new Citizen Data Cloud allows agencies to talk to one another. AI-powered assistants guide users through the updated maze. E-prescriptions are being standardised across hospitals. Centralised databases have already wiped out more than 300 redundant procedures.
This goes well much further than modernising government. It remakes the relationship between the state and the market. Agencies are being told to stop asking for information they already possess. Licences once renewed on paper are moving to post-operation audits. Ministers have been instructed to simplify rather than embellish. Business associations now sit inside the reform process. Files that stall are escalated directly to national leadership.
The turn did not come out of nowhere. Vietnamese firms have long grumbled about vague rules, uneven enforcement and compliance costs that feel deliberately punitive. The Investment Law formally labels 227 sectors as “conditional”. Ministerial rules add thousands more. Fuel importers, for example, must invest in infrastructure built to last decades to obtain licences that expire every five years, a neat system in which risk and regulation point in opposite directions.
The government appears to have heard the complaints. Deputy prime minister Ho Duc Phoc is leading a regulatory clean-up with the explicit goal of cutting business conditions, delays and compliance costs by 30%. State-owned firms are being nudged towards strategic infrastructure and digital investment. Administration is shifting from pre-approval to results-based oversight. The goal is to make regulation predictable and reviewable.
From October, companies that insist on paper will find their licences delayed. Human-resources teams are being retrained for e-forms. Lawyers are rewriting contracts in machine-readable formats. Compliance officers are learning to think a little more like programmers.
Nepal sits in a different place altogether, preserved in administrative amber. Many services advertised as “online” still require a physical pilgrimage to a district office. Digital identity remains fragmented and inconsistently recognised. Registering a business can involve ten separate departments, each guarding its own paper trail. Tax returns uploaded electronically must sometimes be filed again in hard copy. Permits are issued by hand, scanned, emailed, printed out and stamped once more, just to be safe.
These habits are defended as safeguards. They look more like symptoms of institutional inertia. Policy papers endorse digital governance. Budgets allocate funds. Portals appear. Deadlines, however, remain elastic and follow-through sporadic.
Political leaders speak earnestly about faster growth and foreign investment. Nepal is pitched as a hydropower hub, a tourism magnet, an outsourcing destination. Yet no number of megawatts or hotel beds can compensate for administrative drag. Investors are not seduced by energy potential if licensing feels like a scavenger hunt.
Vietnam’s model will not transplant neatly. A party-state enjoys fewer veto points and firmer executive control. Still, the central lesson travels well. Economic modernisation does not come from announcing ambition. It comes from dismantling analogue processes and replacing them with digital systems that can be audited. It means shifting from discretion to rules and from repetition to interoperability.
Nepal could start small. Fix dates for making specific services paper-free and ban ministries from demanding documents already submitted elsewhere. Publish compliance dashboards for government departments. Give citizens and firms unified accounts that link tax, licensing and land records.
Vietnam treats paperwork as an economic drag that slows growth. Nepal treats it as a minor formality. The economy does not pause while forms are stamped. ■
